Earlier this week we
wrote about the current abundance of books about books. Here are more:
Novelist Nick Hornby
writes the monthly "Stuff I've Been Reading" column for the Believer, and More Baths Less
Talking (McSweeney's Books) is a compilation of his last
two years of reviews. Eclectic and amusing.
The Books That Mattered:
A Reader's Memoir by Frye Gaillard (NewSouth Books) is a tribute to the books
that "enriched and altered his life." His literary explorations
include excerpts from the works he cites, reminding us of past favorites and
showing us soon-to-be new ones.
Hans Weyandt, co-owner
of Micawber's Books in St. Paul, asked indie
booksellers for their top 50 reads, which, along with anecdotes on
the bookselling life, he has collected in Read
This! Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores (Coffee
House Press).
Jacques Bonnet has
thousands of books, and in Phantoms
on the Bookshelves (Overlook), muses on collecting books and even
cataloging them, good advice for those of us "besieged" by our own
libraries.
With The Books They Gave Me: True Stories
of Life, Love and Lit (Free Press), Jen Adams gathered stories of
books received as gifts--perfect selections, ill-chosen ones, romantic ones,
illuminating ones.
Who doesn't judge people
by what's on their bookshelves (although e-book readers make this well nigh
impossible)? Lauren Leto, in Judging
a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers
Everywhere (Harper Perennial) not only helps you stereotype someone
by their favorite author, or figure out what your child will grow up to be by
what you read them, but shows you how to fake reading, say, Jonathan Franzen.
Or you could just get How Not to Read: Harnessing the Power of a
Literature-Free Life by Dan Wilbur (Perigee). Entire genres summed
up in one page, storming through the classics by reading every third word,
literary insults to memorize.
--Marilyn Dahl,
book review editor, Shelf
Awareness
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